Editor Log: December 2003 (idea)

It took a lengthy server break to make me see it, but I've finally realized that Wikipedia is what E2 will never be.

Content, content, content. Wikipedia already has much, much more information than Everything2 and is evolving much more rapidly.

All content is free under the GNU Free Documentation License. No risk of it all being lost if E2 dies or decides to take its marbles and go home; there are already completely legal and completely separate copies floating about.

Lower barrier of entry. No need to craft 20 writeups from scratch acceptable by the esoteric criteria of E2, anybody can plunge in and fix a typo -- without even logging in!

Actually, there are admins, but they are a non-exclusive group (134 members as of this writing) and their powers are largely restricted to temporarily freezing pages subject to an edit war.

No silly Edit These E2 Titles bureaucracy. Writeups can be moved, renamed, redirected and unredirected easily by all. (Deletion is a bit more complex, but with only one mutating writeup per node, it's also needed far less often.)

Sure, Wikipedia's just an encyclopedia while E2 is meant to cover everything, and it's true enough that this encyclopedic nature makes it more boring -- no more whoring for XP by regaling you with tales of Japanese girls in a hot tub while dissecting a brand of sake. But as a factual noder, 99% of my writeups are fit for Wikipedia as is, and there are plenty of others of my kind who have seen the light.